Marvell’s ‘Definition of Love’ should be recited over my corpse, as a reminder to everybody present that I knew when I was outclassed.

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New episode: Narratives Podcast

James Bradley's major essay ‘UNEARTHED: Last Days of the Anthropocene’ is an urgent exploration of the existential implications of climate change. It is a compelling listen, and an important call-to-action for us to remain realistic yet hopeful in reimagining what the end of the world as we know it might mean.

My father taught me how to read English long before any schoolteacher could. While I was too young to remember the process and how it was that I came to read, my mother tells me that most days during my toddler years Dad would prop me up on his thigh, and with newspaper in hand, he’d point to the various newspaper headlines; slowly reading both letters and words aloud, before encouraging me to echo his voice and actions. I can imagine my father’s Black hand and his utilitarian index finger pointing to the bold letters on the crisp and creamy […]

How is it that Martin Scorsese’s declaration, in an early October interview with Empire, that Marvel movies ‘aren’t cinema’ contained sufficient kindling to fuel a conversation in which responses were still being reported seven weeks later? The length of this conversation became its most remarkable feature, seeming to entail the logic that permitted its perpetual extension. This essay is not meant to further extend that debate as such, but to wonder at the cultural obsession it models. Because the question of whether a particular object can be accurately described as art tends to be less interesting than our obsession with […]

Nearly sixty years ago Sir Robert Menzies, Leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister of Australia, was trying to do a secret deal with his British counterpart, Harold Macmillan, for the supply of nuclear weapons to Australia, a deal he was keen to see done before the treaty banning atmospheric nuclear tests came into effect. A formerly Top Secret file has been lying on the open shelves of the UK Public Records Office and now its National Archives since 1993. Labelled Nuclear Capability in Australia it opens with a letter from Prime Minister Robert Menzies to his British counterpart, […]

I have not read William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies, a text many meet in high school literature class. Despite this, I thought I knew the plot through cultural reference. There was that Simpsons episode, where the Springfield yellow school bus goes off route and sees the kids stranded on a deserted island.

My boys think it’s uncool to get a lift home from school. They’d rather be on the bus with the others, standing in the aisle with their earphones in one ear and their school bags over one shoulder. Sometimes they try to walk home but I’m worried they’ll hurt their backs, carrying all those books.

I consider myself somebody who watches a lot of reality television. Married at First Sight was once my chosen poison, and it is exactly as it sounds: a juicy social ‘experiment’ where, according to objective compatibility standards, two individuals are coupled, only to meet for the first time at the altar.

A reworking of Ezra Pound’s ‘Salutation’ for the 21st Century
O generation of the absolutely online
And absolutely connected,
I have seen fisherpeople on YouTube,
I have seen them with their unreliable internet,